All of this must seem like a dream come true for publicists of George Clooney’s upcoming film, The Monuments Men, about the motley Allied crew charged with rescuing art from the Nazis during World War II. But many people were surprised by the flood of revelations, wondering: How can there still be so much stolen art at large 70 years after the war?

For decades, the keepers of Nazi-looted art have been playing hide-and-seek with the world, biding their time until various statues of limitations lapse. They have hidden behind archaic laws that complicate the return of looted works of art to their rightful owners—or they have simply refused to investigate red flags that suggest a dubious provenance for a work in their collection.

A 1997 study estimated that some 100,000 stolen pieces of art were still missing. Newspaper reporters were beginning to investigate the Nazi provenance of prominent art works on their own, embroiling museums in scandal.

In 1998, 44 nations met in Washington, D.C. and agreed to make efforts to find and publicly identify art that might be Nazi loot, and to find a “fair and just solution” for restitution. The agreement called for a central registry of suspect art, open to researchers. The pact was nonbinding, a collective moral pledge to transparency and justice.

Hundreds of artworks have been returned since 1998. But there has been no stampede of museums, auction houses, and collectors eager to comply with the still-unfulfilled commitment to create a central public registry. In much of Europe, laws still tolerate the “gray market” for stolen art. When a family spotted two paintings belonging to them in an auction catalogue in Germany recently, the anonymous sellers simply withdrew the works from sale and disappeared.

However, our hyper-viral media landscape has revealed the discreet shenanigans of the art world to a larger and far less tolerant audience. Social media is shaking up the issue, bringing long-overdue claims into the open—and showing there is a long way to go in complying with the moral obligations of restitution.

Take the case of the paintings and drawings stored in Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment, an astounding cache of more than 1,400 works by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Munch, and Cezanne, some of them reportedly stashed between the canned food in his pantry. From the moment the story of this art cache and its Nazi ties broke in the press in November, it went viral on Facebook and Twitter, sweeping across time zones and diverting attention from celebrity news.

Gurlitt’s artworks were acquired by his father, an art dealer named Hildebrand Gurlitt. Some of that work was pulled down from the walls of German museums in the late ’30s after being deemed “degenerate art”—modern art that Hitler viewed as not projecting Germanic values. Some of the paintings in his cabinet probably belonged to Jewish families.

After the war, Gurlitt repackaged himself—as many did—to deflect accusations of Nazi collaboration. He cast himself as a persecuted victim, claiming that he was dismissed as a museum director because of a Jewish grandmother, and that he lost his livelihood when the modern art he built his business on was deemed “degenerate.” The reality was more complicated: He was employed by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry to help sell “degenerate” paintings seized from museums, as well as other pieces of art confiscated from Jewish families. He was elevated to a position as curator for the “Führermuseum” in Linz, which Hitler intended to be the cultural crown jewel of the Reich.

In the confusion after the war, the real-life Monuments Men returned some of the art they confiscated from Gurlitt. That artwork was inherited by his son, Cornelius, and put in his closet. The drawings and paintings remained there for decades, though Gurlitt sold pieces occasionally for living expenses. German authorities found the art in March 2012 while investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion but remained silent about the discovery until a German magazine, Focus, broke the news in early November 2013.

It became clear that Germany was woefully unprepared to handle the firestorm that ensued. Bavarian authorities told an astonished public that they may have to return the stolen art to Gurlitt because the 30-year criminal statute on theft has expired. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for this statute to be overruled and for such cases to be considered theft in the service of genocide, under the Nuremberg War Crimes framework.

Another curious legalistic impediment to justice cited by German authorities in the Gurlitt case is a 1938 Nazi-era law that is still on the books and provides for the legal seizure of so-called “degenerate art.” Germany should follow the example of post-war Austria and France, which passed laws declaring Nazi-era legal transactions “null and void.”

Restitution is not only judged in a court of law, but also in the court of public opinion, according to Stuart Eizenstat, an expert in Holocaust reparations. In an age of social media, these cases are playing out before a packed courtroom on Twitter, Facebook, and other websites. The rise of social media is amplifying restitution claims that got their first real hearing in the press.

Since the passage of a 1998 art restitution law, Austrian state museums have been forced to return a dozen masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, the country’s most famous painter. Klimt’s most significant portrait models, collectors, and patrons were Jewish modernists from the same milieu that supported psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and other distinguished pioneers of turn-of-century Vienna. When the Nazis arrived in Vienna, they seized Klimt works and persecuted the artist’s Jewish patrons. This set the stage for a seemingly endless stream of contemporary claims that hit the media in the 1990s and continue to this day. Each ugly episode revealed an ugly story.

When a Vienna portrait show opened at London’s National Gallery in September, some people called for the seizure of its premier Klimt portrait of a bare-shouldered Amalie Zuckerkandl, who was murdered with her daughter in a concentration camp. The painting is in the permanent collection of Austria’s national art museum, which claims it has a clean bequest from an art dealer. But Los Angeles art restitution attorney Randol Schoenberg called for the painting to be held in London while the merits of the claim were considered.

In late October, the director of Austria’s Leopold Museum, Tobias Natter, resigned after just two years on the job after a member of his staff joined a new Klimt Foundation to showcase Klimt—and his illegitimate son, the late Gustav Ucicky, a Nazi propaganda filmmaker and art collector. “Ucicky collected in the Nazi era,” Natter told Bloomberg. “Why do we have to get into bed with these people?”

The Klimt Foundation is in discussions with the heirs of Gertrude Loew, whose ethereal 1902 Klimt portrait is among the four paintings and 10 drawings in the Foundation’s collection. The family said the painting was left with a baroness friend for safekeeping when they fled Austria. It is unclear exactly how it ended up with Ucicky, although top Nazis helped him to collect paintings by his late father—some of which had been stolen from Jewish families.

The Klimt Foundation is silent about the fate of another painting that Gustav Ucicky owned, “Water Snakes II.” The painting of sinuous floating women was confiscated in 1938 from Jenny Steiner, a Jewish cousin of Joseph Pulitzer. In 1940, when the painting was about to be sold at auction, Vienna’s Nazi governor intervened so that Ucicky could buy it.

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported in September that Ucicky’s widow, Ursula, had sold “Water Snakes II” to Qatari royals for as much as $120 million. Some of the proceeds went to Steiner’s heirs—and the rest went to Ursula Ucicky, who was setting up the Klimt Foundation and might need to reach a settlement over the portrait of Gertrude Loew, according to Der Standard. No one—including Sotheby’s, which was reported to have brokered the sale—has commented.

There is a good reason for the silence. If this is all true, a foundation for Austria’s finest painter, created with the help of proceeds from Nazi loot, is an outrage that would not be lost on the public. These kinds of messy details are one reason that authorities are reluctant to open the files on collections like the Gurlitt hoard: They know it won’t be pretty.

Yet the ongoing Nazi art theft debacle in Munich may prove to be a “teachable moment,” in the words of Holocaust restitution expert Marc Masurovsky. The whole world is watching. It is still possible for Germany to confront this moral challenge with grace—and set a dignified example for other countries that may be forced to confront belated Nazi art theft restitutions of their own.

The post That Matisse in the Pantry? The Nazis Stole It. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Speaking to a full house at the Skirball Cultural Center–with audience members sitting everywhere, including the stage, which they shared with a reproduction of the painting–O’Connor began by explaining that Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait was lost into history by World War II. “It became a beautiful enigma like the Mona Lisa, but with a dramatic back story–and not a very well understood one, until recently,” she said.

O’Connor first heard about the painting in 2001, in a column in the Westside Weekly about a dress shop owner, Maria Altmann, who was the heir to a Gustav Klimt painting of her aunt that had been stolen by the Nazis. This wasn’t an uncommon story, except for the fact that the painting wasn’t locked away in a castle or an obscure private collection but in Austria’s national museum, the Belvedere, along with four other works of Klimt’s. And Altmann was suing to get it back.

O’Connor wasn’t interested in the painting itself at first, but as soon as she spoke with Maria Altmann–who was in her 80s at the time and still selling clothing out of her home–she was intrigued by Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Bloch-Bauer’s Vienna was “was an explosion of creativity,” “a mecca for really interesting people,” and a participant in the modernist movement that was sweeping Europe’s capitals. Women were on the vanguard of all these currents, collecting art, creating salons for intellectuals, and supporting a wide range of culture from Freud to avant-garde music. They were also following the lead of Austria’s dysfunctional royal family: having affairs and looking for independence.

Jews like Bloch-Bauer were also becoming more influential. One out of every 10 of the city’s residents was Jewish, and despite anti-Semitic backlash and even some violence, Viennese Jews were also thriving.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was young, beautiful, and married to a sugar baron twice her age. It was he who commissioned Klimt’s portrait. Eager to become involved in the city’s intellectual life, Adele started to invite people to her salon, including Mark Twain, who was living in Vienna at the time (and was rumored to be Jewish because he had so many Jewish friends) and Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, who at that time was infamous for writing a fictionalized memoir of a teenage prostitute.

But Klimt was the most magnetic star in Adele’s orbit, a handsome celebrity artist who was rebelling against the establishment, trying to make room for modern art in the city, and shocking everyone with his experimental art. Accused of creating pornography by his critics, Klimt turned to Adele and her friends–the new guard rather than the old–for patronage. Women, O’Connor explained, saw his drawings and paintings as rare representations of female sexuality. “This period was a little like the ’60s in some ways,” she said. “People wanted to change their lives.” Having a Klimt portrait in those days was a little risqué but also sensational.

Adele’s husband commissioned her portrait in 1903. Klimt spent three years drawing and painting Adele before the portrait appeared in 1907. It became a symbol of the Austrian empire that persisted even under Nazi rule, when its name was changed from “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” to “The Lady in Gold.” Adele and the other Jewish models who had been a source of much speculation–no one knows to this day what really happened between Adele and Klimt–had become anonymous.

Twenty percent of the art in Europe was stolen during World War II, including “The Lady in Gold,” which the Nazis put on display in the Belvedere. Adele had died before the war began, but her husband tried to get the painting back unsuccessfully before he died in 1945; his heirs were told that the family had donated the paintings, and the artworks remained in Austria.

In 2001, when she met Maria Altmann, O’Connor didn’t think her lawsuit would go anywhere. But Altmann and her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, were determined to succeed, and the case wound its way through the courts until 2006, when the paintings were returned to the family’s heirs. Since this court case began, Austria has returned a dozen paintings to their owners, giving them up much more quickly than before.

Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait was purchased by Ronald Lauder for $135 million and is on display at his Neue Galerie in New York City. But the other paintings that were returned to the family were sold and then removed from public view–a development that raised further moral questions.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read artists’ musings on their muses here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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Gustav Klimt painted Adele Bloch-Bauer. Eric Clapton sang about Pattie Boyd (also known as “Layla”). Dante wrote about Beatrice. In advance of “Gustav Klimt’s Stolen Masterpiece,” a Zócalo event, a painter and composer describe their muse.

She is slightly short and gracefully curved

My muse is named Leah. I have been painting her for a year and a half and have made over 10 paintings and half a dozen drawings. I find Leah infinitely “paintable.” Some figure models, the ones we painters melt over, look graceful and natural in almost any gesture or pose they take. Her figure is strong–from riding her bicycle as her sole mode of transportation all over the five boroughs of New York to playing accordion and doing massage–but she is not boney or “cut.” Her form is very feminine, slightly short and gracefully curved. Her work as an artist model is a commitment to both her own growth and to the artist’s production. It’s not so easy, really, to stand naked in front of someone while they scrutinize you–for hours. Every pose she takes for me shares both her outward form and her inner intention. She is completely comfortable in her own skin. This is a quality that makes her beautiful to me.

For me, beauty is not something you find in a magazine, with pouty lips and a push-up bra. That is fashion beauty, lowercase “b.” Beauty–capital “B”–is about integrity. Integrity-wholeness–can be the biological perfection of youth, or it can be the hard-won unity of spirit and flesh from a life well lived. By this definition, my 97-year-old grandmother was very beautiful.

So Leah represents, and brings into my studio and work, the kind of Beauty I believe the world needs more of. I believe in the holiness of the body and the unity of the flesh and the spirit. In expressing the human figure I want to share my ideal that the body and spirit should be in harmony-not in opposition, or separable, or in a hierarchy.

Last year, I made a painting of Leah called “In the Garden“, (2011, Oil on canvas, 28 x 20 inches). I was also reading The Prophet (1923), in which the author Kahlil Gibran writes that beauty is “a garden forever in bloom,” and “beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.” My painting reflects this sentiment and the belief that beauty is life that is integrated and whole-spirit and flesh together–as in my muse.

Patricia Watwood is a contemporary classical painter of figures and portraits. Her solo exhibit, “Patricia Watwood: Myths and Individuals,” is on view at The Forbes Galleries, NYC, from Feb 17- June 9, 2012. Watwood’s paintings explore myth, narrative and the human presence in oil paintings and drawings.

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She dwells about the Nile

To state the obvious, I musically compose my muse, Egypt. The title of my latest album, Egypt: Mother of the World, reveals that. As it happens, the word muse denotes one of the ancient Greek guardians who presided over musical art, and ancient Egypt had a protector of music, too. So the idea of the muse is fundamental.

It’s difficult to not come off as a dreamer when I describe my art, but, in a nutshell, my muse draws me closer to the source of musical inspiration: refinement and ecstasy. These are the qualities that performers of traditional Arabic music hold in esteem. The Egyptian Sufi musical method, which I’ve practiced in thousands of musical meditations and countless hours of music-making, is my muse and how I muse. They are one and the same.

Riad Abdel-Gawad lives in Southern California. He is currently an online artist for Carnegie Hall. Visit him on www.facebook.com/musicariad and at http://www.musicariad.com.

*Photo by Lynn (Gracie’s mom).

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